This seems to be giving him more credit than he deserves. If he's trying to get republicans on board, all he needs to do is keep crowing about free speech and cancel culture. Actually making any changes to twitter isn't required. IMO he banned journalists that criticized him... because they criticized him. occams razor

I'm highly skeptical that Elon decided to light billions of dollars on fire so he could get some DoD money for Starlink.

Dude, go blog this and submit it instead of pasting it on everyone one of these threads.

This seems very conspiracy-theory-ish. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

> a massive DoD program, which requires Republicans to fund.

Contrary to the partisan memes, support for military funding is actually bipartisan. Republicans often like to say that Democratic politicians don't support the military, to pander to their base, but this isn't actually true. And Democratic Party sometimes like to play at being peaceniks, again to pander to their base, but this isn't true either.

Look up the composition of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. 50/50 split between parties. You don't get DoD projects funded by sucking up to Republicans, you need to convince politicians on both sides of the aisle.

@georgeg23, comments in this thread are now disabled for new users so I'll reply here. It doesn't matter if SDI was originally Reagan's baby. Reagan is dead and nothing will get funded without approval from both parties. The Republicans can't fund the SDA on their own.

I have to say this initially rings to me like a conspiracy theory, but there's lots of info you shared that I wasn't aware of and is quite interesting.

I personally would not be against an interest group pushing over their lifetime for a common interest such as space exploration. Although turning this into a "Twitter is a way to curry favours" conclusion is a stretch.

I dunno. Why wouldn't Starlink have gotten that contract anyway...? And why would he threaten to cut off Ukraine if securing this contract were a number one priority for him...? Democrats aren't really less keen on military spending than Republicans, if you want to be a huge military contractor, you'd want the support of both.

I mean this is an intriguing rationalization, but I don’t buy it.

Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.

This reads like an elaborate Skynet troll. Is this for real?

The military wanting to spend money on a starlink like low earth orbit system is nothing new or surprising.

They have been spending vast amounts of money on various types of geostationary based two-way satellite communications technology for 40 years. And they currently do so on some very low term projects and contracts.

Remember that the US DoD is what saved Iridium too.

They are always on the lookout for new or better tech.

Musk entirely aside for the moment, fact is that the starlink Redmond team has been first to market with something that is WAY ahead of kuiper, oneweb, telesat or any other leo satellite network in real world results.

flaming out and setting billions on fire does not accomplish this

Explain like I'm a 5 year old Canadian please.

This comment reads like something that is probably true but is hard to prove because it’s a judgment of something that is intangible by nature (motivations) unless its complimented by a bevy of concrete evidence (e.g. emails, testimonies).

I think that you’re tangentially right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk purchased Twitter because he had to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever motivated him to posture toward buying it in the first place was motivated by what you’re explaining.